Our Founder

Dave Lindsey

Founder

Dave Lindsey is a business executive, successful entrepreneur and influential leader. He is the founder and chairman of DEFENDERS, a fast-growth company that is the largest home services dealer in the nation and ADT’s only Authorized Premier Provider. Dave and his wife, Jessica, started the business out of a spare bedroom in their home in 1998, selling home security door-to-door. Almost 18 years later, DEFENDERS has revenue nearing $500 million, 1,900 employees in 48 states, 148 branch offices, and has been on the Inc. Magazine 500 list five times.

In 2015, DEFENDERS was ranked #17 in the world by Training Inc. magazine for its world-class employee development and training programs. DEFENDERS’ slogan “Businesses don’t grow — people do”, isn’t just a tagline. It’s the foundation that DEFENDERS was built upon. Dave realized early on that he must grow his people in order to grow his business, and he is passionate about sharing this learning with other businesses.

For this reason, Dave founded trueU in 2014, which is a community of like-minded organizations that want to help their people grow through self-awareness, personal development, servant leadership and connection. The goal is to raise up thousands of leaders worldwide who believe there is a greater purpose to business than just profits and paychecks and who want to learn from and share with one another.

Strongly believing in the transformative power of service, Dave also founded the Super Service Challenge in 2011, a signature offering of trueU. This annual challenge encourages coworkers to form a team and serve nonprofits. As a result, they can potentially win prize money for the charities they serve. Just four years after launching, this national contest has spurred nearly 1,300 companies to engage more than 106,000 employees into service for roughly 1700 nonprofits, yielding more than $5.5 million in charitable donations.

Dave is very involved in the community through his participation with Big Brothers Big Sisters, National Christian Foundation, YPO Christian Fellowship Network, Youth With A Mission, Homes of Hope and many other nonprofits.